What is the Mention Index?
Tagging others into a conversation, using an @mention is the best way for extending and deepening a discussion. Inside a team, it is a way of targeting the discussion to those in the team that might contribute most. Beyond a single team, a high proportion of tagging indicates staff are being more discriminating in who to encourage to join a conversation and hence minimising the amount of ‘team noise’ occurring.
How to use the Mention Index?
Individual/Personal Context
It’s good to get into the habit of tagging through @mentions when your messaging is not as relevant to your whole network. Attracting ‘mentions’ is also a good measure of recognition within the teams you operate within (see your key statistics). Best practice tagging though is to only tag those you want to take a specific action; otherwise you run the risk of generating “notification noise”.
Team Context
Along with the creation of ‘channels’ for specialising discussion to a subset of team members, mentioning can be used to selectively attract the attention of individuals in the team. The effectiveness of the @mention signals can be seen by the number of replies the message receives.
Extensive use of @mentions in a team can improve the efficiency of communications amongst team members.
Enterprise Context
In general, a high level of tagging through mentions is an indicator of more efficient and targeted communications amongst and between teams. While it may not be appropriate to include @mentions in all messages, it would be considered positive if a consistently high level of mentioning is maintained.
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